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Wen Wancheng refused to accept the announcement from Australiameant he had lost his son, who was a passenger on the flight.

"My son is still alive. My son is still alive," said the 63-year-old from Shandong province. "I don't believe the news."

There are 153 Chinese citizens on board flight MH370, whose relatives have been waiting for news at the Lido hotel in Beijing.

06.05 Malaysian Airlines has said it is not moving families or Airline representatives to Australia unless the objects in the Indian Ocean are definitely from MH370.

05.40 After ASMA said two objects up to 24 metres (78 ft 9 inches) in size had been spotted by satellite in the southern Indian Ocean, Reuters has published a list of the basic dimensions of the Boeing 777-200ER which was used on Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, according to Boeing's website.

Wing span 60.9 metres (199 feet 10 inches)

Overall length 63.7 metres (209 feet)

Tail Height 18.5 metres (60 feet 9 inches)

Fuselage Diameter 6.19 metres (20 feet 4 inches)

(The length of each wing was not immediately available but the published data implies that each wing is about 27.4 metres long, after adjusting for the width of the fuselage).

05.22 Here is more from ABC reporter David Wright, who is aboard one of the search planes:

• A Hercules plane is heading to the area to drop marker buoys at the search area.

• RAAFOrion planes can spend two hours at a time searching the area for the debris.

• The possible debris has been located at the southern tip of the search area.

• Water in the search area is "several thousand metres deep".

04.44 The press conference is wrapping up. Mr Young says: "We may get a sighting, we may not, we may get it tomorrow, we may not, we will continue to do this until we find these objects or we are convinced we cannot find them."

04.40 Mr Young has told families of the missing that "AMSA is doing its level best".

"This is a lead, it is probably the best lead we have now, but we have to get there, find them, see them, assess them to know whether it is really meaningful."

Air Commodore John McGarry (L) speaks with John Young, Australian Maritime Safety Aiuthority emergency response general manager, during a press conference about the discovery from satellite imagery of objects possibly related to the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 (AFP/GETTY IMAGES)

04.31 The AMSA press conference is starting. The authority’s general manager John Young has said that satellite imagery have picked up "indistinct" objects that are a reasonable size and probably awash with water. Here are some main points:

•He said the largest object was about 24 metres, another was smaller than that.

•Further satellite images are expected after commercial satellites are redirected to the area.

•Four aircraft have been relocated to locate the objects.

•A merchant ship is expected to arrive at 6pm .

•Warship HMAS success is also en route but is some days away. She is equipped to recover any objects located.

•Weather conditions are moderate but poor visibility have been reported.

•"AMSA continues to hold great concerns for the passenger and crew onboard," he said.

04.21 Hishammuddin Hussein, Malaysia's acting transport minister, has just given a quick doorstop on the Australian discovery of possible wreckage.

”Every lead is a hope,” he said. “This time I just hope it is a positive development.”

He said it was “too early” to say if the objects are debris or exactly where they were. Urging caution, he said Malaysian and other authorities were analysing the satellite imagery.

“Like we have done with information from the Chinese satellite that were leads earlier we have done the some format.”

04.10 News of the potential find has reached relatives of the missing.

<noframe>Twitter: Philip Wen - Big flurry of activity on the WeChat group Chinese <a href="https://twitter.com/search?src=hash&q=%23MH370" target="_blank">#MH370</a> passenger families have set up. Telling each other to keep calm.</noframe>

04.02 The development comes after Australia’s maritime authority said the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight off the coast in Australia had halved in size.

In an update on Wednesday, the authority’s general manager, John Young, said the initial search zone off Australia – an area of some 600,000 sq km – had been reduced to roughly 300,000 sq km and had been moved to 2,300km off the coast of Perth.

03.44 Mr Abbott said he had already spoken with his Malaysian counterpart Najib Razak.

03.35 Here is what Mr Abbott told parliament: "New and credible information has come to light in relation to the search ... in the south Indian Ocean. The Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) has received information based on satellite imagery of objects possibly related to the search."

AMSA is due to hold a press conference at 4.30 GMT.

03.24 In the first bit of significant news in the search for the plane for some days, Australia's prime minister Tony Abbott has said two objects possibly related to the missing Malaysia Airlines flight have been spotted on satellite imagery in the southern Indian Ocean.

Mr Abbott told Parliament in Canberra that a Royal Australian Airforce Orion has been diverted to the area to attempt to locate the objects. The Orion is expected to arrive in the area on Thursday afternoon. Three additional aircraft are expected to follow for a more intensive search.

Mr Abbott cautioned, however, that the task of locating these objects will be extremely difficult and "it may turn out that they are not related to the search for flight MH370."

02.15 AP reports that both sides of Malaysia's bitterly contested political divide are fighting over the disappearance and hunt for the missing plane.

The opposition is attacking the government, relishing in the international criticism that has been directed at leaders unused to such scrutiny. Pro-government blogs are focusing on the pilot's support for opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, hoping that suspicions against the former will discredit the latter.

Malaysian politics have been defined in recent years by the government's attempts to stop the rise of opposition parties chipping away at its five-decade grip on power. Anwar, the opposition movement's main leader, spent six years in jail on corruption and sodomy charges, a campaign that Western rights groups and governments say is politically motivated.

The missing plane has reopened this fault line because the pilot, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, is a supporter of Anwar and the uncle of his daughter-in-law.

US officials familiar with the investigation tell ABC News that the hourly satellite pings from the jet had yielded far more clues than expected, enabling the focus of the search to be cut in half - from an area roughly the size of Texas to that of Arizona.

21.35 Obama has been speaking to local news networks today on a broad range of subjects, including MH370.

<noframe>Twitter: Peter Doocy - Pres Obama on Malaysia Air Flt 370: "Sometimes these things take time, but we hope and pray that we can get to the bottom of what happened"</noframe>

20.45 The scene at the Kuala Lumpur hotel where families are awaiting news of their loved ones got completely out of control this morning. Here's Sky News Kay Burley running up a downwards escalator to try to speak to one of the family members.

The imam cupped his palms before his face and invited the congregation to pray. "Oh Allah, return to us those who are lost. Oh, Allah, grant safe passage to MH370," he said.

The prayer was not unusual. The setting was.

Gathered in the courtyard of a shopping mall in a suburb of Kuala Lumpur, the Muslim religious leader was followed by a Christian reading from the Bible, then a Buddhist monk, a Hindu and finally a Taoist priest echoing the imam's pleas before hundreds of worshippers in a largely Muslim country where religious intolerance has been on the rise.

The baffling mystery over the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 with 239 people on March 8 has united Malaysia, a nation of numerous ethnicities, as never before in recent memory.

19.20 Malaysian authorities have so far been reluctant to accept much in the way of outside help. But now, 12 days after the disappearance, the FBI has been formally asked to the help the Malaysians examine the pilots' computer hard drives.

17.55 Anwar Ibrahim, the Malaysian opposition leader, whose was once again given a prison sentence hours before the flight disappeared has given an interview to CNN. Capt Zaharie Shah was a member of his extended family and supporter of his party. Mr Ibrahim says met Mr Shah “on a number of occasions” and he was “certainly not” a fanatic and a"gainst any form of extremism.”

16.52 The pilots of the vanished Malaysian Airlines fight were not hijackers and are likely to have died trying to save the aircraft from an onboard fire, an expert in the Lockerbie trial has said.

Billie Vincent, the former head of security at the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA), said he believed MH370 diverted off course in a desperate bid to reach safe harbour as the cabin filled with smoked.

"As opposed to being hijackers, the crew were heroically trying to save the airplane, themselves and the passengers when this catastrophe hit," he told The Telegraph.

Mr Vincent was a key witness in the civil trial that followed the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, where families successfully sued Pan Am for $500 million in compensation.

The former air traffic controller said he believed MH370 had suffered a "catastrophic event" that filled the cabin with smoke or noxious fumes shortly after the pilots made final contact with ground control at 1.19am on March 8.

Mr Vincent, who helped Malaysia install security procedures at Kuala Lumpur airport, said smoke could have been caused by an electrical fire, hazardous materials in the cargo hold or a small bomb that failed to destroy the aircraft.

16.27 The change in direction was entered into a cockpit console at least 12 minutes before Mr Fariq, the co-pilot, said “good night” to Malaysian air traffic control, CNN is reporting, citing an unidentified law enforcement official. Two minutes later, the plane’s transponder was switched off, and it disappeared from civilian radar.

The timings of the last message and the change in direction have been hotly debated - as the information could prove crucial in figuring out who or what was responsible. If contact was made after the change in course, it could possibly indicate the cockpit was aware of a problem which they hid from ground controllers.

Fariq Abdul Hamid invited two women into the cockpit of a of Malaysian airlines flight

16.08 The FBI is formally joining the investigation into the missing airliner to help analyse the hard-drives from computers seized from Capt Zaharie's home. They will also try to recover the files that were deleted from the simulator a month before the flight.

Two security officers sit at the entrance of a hotel lounge in Beijing where relatives of passengers from the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 are gathered

15.30 As we reported yesterday, the home-made flight simulator recovered from the pilot’s home included five practice runways. Here's one of the videos Capt Zaharie uploaded onto Youtube.

15.15 The Telegraph's Harriet Alexander has been speaking to a European pilot, to find out what aviation professionals are saying about the events of the past 12 days. He said:

Very strange goings on. Not too sure what to make of it. There is just not enough information to even support any sort of idea, and of course this has led to all sorts of theories.

Also quite hard for us to understand because Europe is so radar intensive - civil and military - so it would unthinkable here.

Far too many strange theories, from non aviation personnel on aviation forums etc that I have just stopped to read them. Hope something is found in a fairly timely manner.

14.05 One theory that seems to have some traction is that the plane may have been brought down after a massive fire broke out in the hold.

Billie Vincent, a US aviation expert who was a forensic witness in the Lockerbie bombing trial, has suggested that either a blaze or an explosion was responsible for the plane crashing and could also explain the lack of communication.

The data released thus far most likely points to a problem with hazardous materials. This scenario begins with the eruption of hazardous materials within the cargo hold – either improperly packaged or illegally shipped – or both.

Mr Vincent believes a fire started in the cargo hold and gradually destroyed the plane’s communications systems. He says toxic fumes would have quickly overwhelmed the passengers and crew.

He said he believed one of the pilots managed to put on an oxygen mask and tried to turn the plane, bound for Beijing, back to Kuala Lumpur.

Mr Vincent added: “The plane then continues until no fuel remains and crashes – most likely into the ocean as there has been no report of any Emergency Locator Transmitter signal which can be received by satellite if the crash was on land.”

13.27 The daughter of a crew member on board missing flight has tugged the heart strings of football fans after tweeting for her dad to come home to watch his favourite team.

Malaysian Maira Nari posted the sincere message on the social media site after her dad missed his beloved Liverpool FC's 3-0 win over Manchester United on Sunday. Her father Andrew Nari, is a chief steward on the missing Malaysia Airlines flight.

13.12 The pilot had programmed a route to a remote Maldives island which has a runway long enough to land a Boeing 777, according to the MailOnline.

Diego Garcia is an overseas territory of the UK, which is rented to the US and is now a huge American naval base.

As we reported earlier - before the fateful Flight MH370, Capt Zaharie has apparently deleted several files from his homemade flight simulator.

12.35 Mr Hussein also told the news conference that Malaysia had received radar data from other countries.

However, as always, the news was shrouded in secrecy. "I can confirm that we have received some radar data, but we are not at liberty to release information from other countries," he said.

12.19 Malaysia's defence minister revealed in today's press conference that Investigators are trying to restore files deleted last month from the home flight simulator of the pilot, Capt. Zaharie Ahmad Shah

Hishammuddin Hussein stressed that Capt. Zaharie must be considered innocent until proven guilty of any wrongdoing, and that members of his family are cooperating in the investigation.

11.53 The Malaysian prime minister's office has said it will investigate the earlier incident in which grieving relatives were thrown out of the press conference by heavy-handed police:

We regret the scenes at this afternoon’s press conference, involving some of the relatives of passengers on board #MH370@HishammuddinH2O

11.50 The 26-nation search for the flight is being conducted across 2.24 million nautical square miles but it is understood the plane is believed to be in the southernmost section of the search area, somewhere in the far south of the Indian Ocean.

“The working assumption is that it went south,” a source has told The Telegraph's Jonathan Pearlman.“The further working assumption within that is that it would be at the southern end of that corridor.”

11.11 Here is a video of the distraught Chinese relatives trying earlier to talk to the press before being dragged away by police. Speaking to a scrum of reporters and photographers one said: “We don’t know how long we will be waiting. It’s been 12 days where’s my son? Why aren’t you giving me any answers.”

11.03 It has only just emerged that, after 12 days of searching, Indonesia has only just provided clearance for surveillance aircraft from Australia, Japan, the United Arab Emirates and Malaysia to overfly its territory, while saying its own vessels await instructions from Kuala Lumpur.

10.36Jonathan Pearlman in Kuala Lumpur says we now know the names of the flight simulator games used by the pilot of MH370 on his homemade device.

Police said Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah played the games Flight Simulator X, Flight Simulator 9 and X-Plane 10. The logs from these games were deleted on February 3 and police are trying to access the deleted information. I spoke yesterday to Peter Chong, a friend of the pilot, who said Zaharie was proud of the simulator but made no attempt to hide it and invited most of his friends to use it.

The investigation is ongoing but at this stage police appear to have found nothing suspicious.

An Indonesian Air Force military surveillance aircraft over the Malacca Strait searching for the missing plane

09.57 Right, after that excitement, some of the other developments to come out of today's press conference.

* Malaysia says 'so far' no red flags on any missing jet passenger. Background checks on nearly all but three of the 239 passengers and crew on board a missing Malaysia Airlines jet have produced no "information of significance". Ukrainian and Russian passengers have not yet been checked

* Files were recently deleted from the home flight simulator of the MH370 pilot. Police say the pilot deleted the logs of his home made flight simulator on February 3 and are still searching the device for clues. There were three separate games on the simulator.

* Two Chinese relatives who were trying to speak to journalists before the briefing by Malaysian officials were heard screaming as they were dragged away by police.

09.48 I've never seen anything quite like it - it's pandemonium as hundreds of reporters descend on two female relatives who were being ushered out of the conference by police.

A Chinese family member of a passenger onboard MH370 screams as she is being brought into a room outside the media conference area at a hotel in Kuala Lumpur

09.44 Incredible scenes as relatives of the passengers knocked to the floor in scuffles outside the media conference room in Kuala Lumpur. Women were forcibly removed after trying to attend plane news conference without permission.

09.36 Hishammuddin Hussein, Malaysia's transport minister, is now giving his daily press conference. He confirms that the Maldives has found no evidence that MH370 flew over the tiny island on March 8.

He says they are sending a new team to Beijing to support passengers' families, imcluding representatives from the prime minister's office and the department of civil aviation.

He says Malaysia Airlines staff are innocent until proven guilty and there should be no further speculation from the press until more if known.

09.30 A source close to the investigation has told Reuters news agency that they believe the plane most likely flew into the southern Indian Ocean, as opposed to north towards Pakistan and India.

"The working assumption is that it went south, and furthermore that it went to the southern end of that corridor," said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The view is based on the lack of any evidence from countries along the northern corridor that the plane entered their airspace, and the failure to find any trace of wreckage in searches in the upper part of the southern corridor.

09.18 Authorities in the Maldives are now investigating reports that islanders saw a "low-flying jumbo jet" on the day MH370 vanished.

Police and the civil aviation authority were investigating reported sightings on a remote island, however the islands' National Defence Force said that no trace of Flight MH370 had been picked up on radar

The investigations were sparked by a report by the Haveeru news websitewhich said that several local residents had spotted a large plane flying over the remote southern island of Kuda Huvadhoo on March 8.

09.13 Our correspondent in Kuala Lumpur, Jonathan Pearlman, says the latest there is that have been were chaotic scenes as Chinese protesters gather inside the hotel conference room being used for daily press briefings.

The protesters, who represented the families of passengers on the plane and apparently came in from Beijing, demanded Malaysia reveal what it knows about the crash. The protesters screamed and wailed as they were led out of the briefing room. Of the 239 passsengers on MH370, 154 were Chinese nationals.

In other developments, the crash investigators still believe it is “highly probably” that MH370 was deliberately flown off course. I just spoke to a source close to the investigation who said investigators believe the plane’s communications were deliberately disabled before it made its unusual turn westward. They are increasingly convinced the plane ended in the far southern section of the two huge corridors currently being searched.

The daily press briefing is due to begin shortly at 5.30 local time. The government said yesterday that police will be present today to provide an update on their investigation into the crew and pilots. As yet, nothing suspicious has emerged in the backgrounds of the pilot and co-pilot.

Selamat Omar shows a picture of his son, flight engineer Mohd Khairul Amri Selamat who was onboard the missing plane

09.06 Arguably the most important detail which will help investigators know whether they are dealing with a hijacking is when the plane changed course - whether it was before or after the co-pilot's last message to ground control.

It emerged overnight from US officials that the abrupt U-turn made by the plane is believed to have been programmed into the onboard computer before the last radio contact was made with the co-pilot.

Sources say the change in direction was made about 12 minutes before Fariq Abdul Hamid told controllers: "All right, good night." This would indicate that the cockpit knew of possible difficult and did not alert officials.

08.24 A girl takes part in a candlelight vigil organized by a social group, the Christian Muslim Alliance Pakistan, for passengers that were aboard a missing Malaysia Airlines plane in Islamabad, Pakistan:

AP

07.52 China has not yet found any sign the missing Malaysian Airlines jet entered in its territory, Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said at a daily news briefing.

07.40 New radar data from Thailand has given Malaysian investigators more potential clues for how to retrace the course of the missing Malaysian airliner.

Thai air force spokesman Air Vice Marshal Montol Suchookorn said that at 1:28 a.m on March 8, Thai military radar "was able to detect a signal, which was not a normal signal, of a plane flying in the direction opposite from the MH370 plane," back toward Kuala Lumpur.

The Thai air force did not check its records because the aircraft was not in "Thai airspace and it was not a threat to Thailand", the spokesman said, denying it had been "withholding information".

07.22 This in from Reuters, investigators close to the search for MH370 believe it most likely that the plane flew into the southern Indian Ocean.

"The working assumption is that it went south, and furthermore that it went to the southern end of that corridor," said the source, referring to a search area stretching from west of Indonesia to the Indian Ocean west of Australia.

05.55 For those of you waking up, a quick recap on the main developments from yesterday and overnight:

Eleven days have passed since Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 went missing, and 26 nations are struggling to search for the airliner over an area more than two-thirds the size of the continental United States.

Malaysian and US officials believe the aircraft was deliberately diverted but an exhaustive background search of the 239 passengers and crew aboard has not yielded any possible motive or link to terrorism.

Malaysia’s top official in charge of the operation said it was vital to reduce the scale of the search and renewed appeals for sensitive military data from its neighbours that Malaysia believes may shed light on where the airliner flew.

The U.S. Navy said it had switched mainly to using P-8A Poseidon and P-3 Orion aircraft to search for the missing plane instead of ships and helicopters.

Investigators piecing together patchy data from military radar and satellites believe that someone turned off vital datalinks and turned west, re-crossing the Malay Peninsula and following a commercial route towards India.

After that, ephemeral pings picked up by one commercial satellite suggest the aircraft flew on for at least six hours, but investigators have very little idea whether it turned north or south, triggering a search expanding across two hemispheres.

Police in the Indian Ocean island chain of the Maldives said they were investigating reports that people on one of its outer islands had seen a low-flying aeroplane there early on March 8. The police gave no further details.

The search covers a total area of 2.24 million nautical miles (7.68 million sq km), from central Asia to the southern Indian Ocean.

05.50 Good morning and welcome to The Telegraph's live coverage of the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.